by Duncan Shields | Dec 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The body was huge. Seven feet tall, at least, and heavy.
X-Rays had shown a delicate tracery of machinery throughout, strengthening the huge frame to allow it to move quickly.
Its bright, neon-blue hair glowed in the dark. It was the same colour as the lips, fingernails, and nipples.
It was the same colour as the glittering eyes.
It was dead now.
It stared out at the scientists, unblinking, and awkward.
It had been found, naked, stumbling through the snow up in Alaska close to a week ago. Its skin was as white as the snow.
We called it Codename Winter because of it.
In the week before its death, it had picked up a few words of our language and could respond to rudimentary questioning. It was a slow process as it seemed to be straining not only to find the words but also the concepts behind them. I hate to say it, but it seemed really stupid.
Its story, told through clumsy mime and pieced together as best we could, was that it had come here from space and had left its ship to explore the wilderness in Alaska. A passing human airplane had spooked Codename Winter’s ship. The ship bolted and the alien was left alone.
It insisted that it was the only one on the ship. It insisted that the ship was probably worried about it and was looking for it.
It had been dead for two hours and there had still been no contact with the ‘ship’ of its story. Planes that had passed in the region she was describing witnessed nothing.
While it was alive, a tennis-ball sized lump of what we took to be biocircuitry in the center of it had given off a steady stream of data that seemed to be directly tied to its sensory organs but we couldn’t decipher the data we collected from it. We were still trying to figure out what the densely packed stream of trinary data meant.
However, it had not issued any transmission that we could detect after the alien’s death. No homing beacon, no SOS message, nothing.
Its death had been immediately preceded by a burst of a data washing through the biocircuitry that burned it out. Codename Winter had looked at us, puzzled, and died that way.
We’d come up with a saddening hypothesis:
Its warranty was up and it had been switched off like a light.
Its ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. The ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.
Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.
The ship wasn’t coming back for this creature any more than we would return to the site of a picnic for a lost fork.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Dec 23, 2009 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Purple waves gently lap at an azure beach. Our footprints quickly wash away in the encroaching tide. The setting twin suns of Rijos, the red giant aptly named Rojo, and her blue companion Danube cast an eerily beautiful violet light on the endless expanse of beach.
We walk hand in hand, her flowing red hair reflecting a dazzling colour for which I have no name.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispers, almost too low to hear, “I wish we could stay here forever.”
“We can,” I replied, stroking her cheek, casually pushing back a loose strand of hair, “we will.”
We sit down to watch Danube make his death plunge into the smooth waters of the sea. We lay down to sleep
In a shabby, cramped yet somehow immaculate room the bodies of two elderly people lay on a cold, brushed stainless steel table. A technician in a coffee stained lab coat watches as his colleague removes the electrodes from their shaven pates and wipes away the conductive saline gel.
The bodies are those of a man and woman well into their centenary years, ravaged by time, hands locked tightly to one another, inseparable even in death.
As the technician carefully cleans and replaces the electrodes in their foam lined drawer and prepares the bodies for further processing, his companion stares intently at the flickering glow of the readouts on his iPadd.
“Marbling good, protein quality high, lipids fine…,” he mumbles as he checks off a box on his list.
“Hey Arnie,” he calls to his friend wheeling the bodies through battered double doors, “I’ll bet Edward G. Robinson would get one hell of a laugh out of this.”
by submission | Dec 21, 2009 | Story
Author : C. S. McClendon
I stepped out of the lobby just in time to watch the last metro transport of the day speed past and turn the corner without so much as slowing down. Great, that meant I had to walk home, and these heels were already killing me, wonderful. Still, no use complaining about it, and at least the trans-walks were clean, not like the way the streets had been ten years or so ago. I slipped the heels off and stepped onto the trans-walk. Technically you can just stand there and let the walk do all the work, as long as you keep an eye out for the intersections, but I didn’t get a butt you could bounce a federal credit off of by standing around, and besides, according to the flash message that had come in before I left work, there was a package waiting outside the apartment, and I didn’t want to risk one of my neighbors snatching it on their way up the shaft before I got home. So I ran.
By the time I made the last intersection and stepped through the entrance of my high-rise, the curfew chimes were sounding through the public address system. Guess it was a good thing I chose to run today. I was going to have to send my supervisor a flash about keeping me late though. If I get caught after curfew just coming home from work we’ll both be in for it.
Stepping into the air shaft I felt the heated gasses ease the tension from aching muscles as they surrounded me and sent me rocketing through the pressure tube toward my apartment. Stepping through the aperture, I snatched up the small, plain brown carton. It might have been anything. All mail comes in these plain unmarked cartons these days after all, since the privacy act of 2112, but I knew what it was, thanks to the flash from FedCom.
I stepped through the door to my place and kicked it shut behind me before slitting the carton open with the lacquered nail of my index finger. No invoice, that was all handled by flash. It was just a small, unmarked silver disc. Again, it could have been anything. I tore the RFID off the spine of the carton, that couldn’t go into the recycler, and tossed the carton itself down the chute. The small plasma readout above the recycler registered a two credit deposit into my account, not that I needed the reminder.
I slid the disc out of its packaging, and tossed it to my desk. Let the sensors start reading while I finished unwinding from work. I dialed up some soft Latin strings on the sound system and moved to the bar to pour a shot of rum, gods it would be good not to come home to an empty house every day. I tossed my heels into the closet in time to hear the beep from my terminal. The desk had finished reading the disc.
“Compile, and execute,” I called out to the empty room, while feeling the first tremble of nerves.
The holographic pickups around the room hummed, and an image coalesced just in front of my chair. The well toned man in front of me cleared his throat, and looked around for just a moment before saying softly, “Good evening, I’m Andrew, your purchase from EmalE: A new kind of companion for a new Generation of women.”
Yes indeed, it was definitely going to be nice not to come home to an empty house every day.
by submission | Dec 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Glenn Song
Jeanette hated Dr. Kogen’s waiting room. It screamed blue at her – the cushions, the walls, and even the magazine covers were coordinated in a fan of azure. Nestled in a wicker basket, on a round table in the center of the room, sat a red delicious apple, a banana, and an orange like a zen puzzle to be pondered. It was too structured, too perfect, but Jeanette dismissed the decor with a mental shake. “Whatever floats your boat,” she thought, tossing a softball almost to the ceiling and catching it first in her right hand, then her left.
Doctor Kogen appeared from behind his door and stood before the blue wall. He flashed a smile at Jeanette, and she half expected him to present her with the five-day forecast. He approached her and shook hands. “Well, are we ready?”
“Hell yeah,” Jeanette said. “I’m ready to walk out of here.”
Kogen frowned. “Did you consider–”
“I’m sick of the chair.”
He plucked the orange from the wicker basket and tossed it to the left of her. She snatched it from the air and looked for traces of disappointment in Kogen’s face. Yeah, she wanted to tell him, I caught it. He simply smiled and said, “Jeanette, before we begin, how does that orange feel to you?”
She tossed the orange in her hands and ran her finger over the lumpy skin.
“What about it?”
“Take a sniff.”
She humored him. “Smells like an orange.” She tossed it back. “The new season starts in two months. I want to play again.”
He nodded. “Very well, this way.” Kogen opened the door a crack. Jeanette placed her hands on the back of her wheels and once the door was half open she revved herself down the hallway. “Third door on your right,” he called after her. She entered the room rolling over a speed bump bundle of wires. LCD panels filled out an entire wall displaying various statistics that would soon be drawn from her body. A stoic figure lay on a bed behind a curtain, but before she could see who it was, two nurses helped her onto her bed, began an IV drip, and placed plugs on her.
“Brainwaves normal. Heart rate, blood pressure, vitals all stable. We’re ready to download,” a nurse said.
“Jeanette, last chance,” Kogen said.
“Yes. Always, yes.”
“Then, take a last look with your human eyes.” Kogen left the room. Jeanette’s world blurred and darkened. The last thing she heard was the sound of her heart flatlining.
* * * * *
“Jeanette.” She identified Kogen’s voice and opened her eyes. Her visual cortex established a pixelated image and then adjusted the resolution. Behind Kogen, a fly fluttered its wings. She saw every wing stroke.
Kogen handed her a mirror. She looked like herself, maybe better. She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt like her hair, maybe softer.
“Diagnostics complete,” said the nurse. “She’s fully functional.”
“Jeanette, we’ll have a battery of tests to conduct before you leave the hospital, but as you are well aware, you’ve died and moved into a mechanized body. How does it feel being a cyborg?” Kogen tossed her an orange.
Her grip surprised her. She crushed the soft fruit, spraying pulp and juice on herself, Kogen, and his nurses. She faced her old body lying next to her and fingered through the mush in her hand, wondering for the first time what she’d done.
by submission | Dec 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
Forty-five feet over Ninevah, Phillip is enclosed in a spherically symmetric potential. He’s feeling somewhat philosophical.
Below, on the steps leading to the courtyard of the Library, Ashurbanipal, the last of the great Assyrian kings, faces his death. He’s surrounded, literally, by advisors, priests and acolytes, and a platoon of soldiers clad in full battle dress of conical iron helmets and rounded wickerwork shields, with short swords at their waists and pikes in hand. They’re waiting for Ashurbanipal’s traitorous sons.
Overhead Phillip is thinking, have I been the best man that I can be?
Outside the potential’s bubble, where crazy math occludes normal time and the obviated spin-state of subatomic particles creates a slight, sparkling shield, Ashurbanipal’s Library rises high above Phillip’s vantage. In two decades time the great Library will be gone, torn down and sacked by the invading Babylonians and Medes. The thirty thousand tablets and texts stored there will be discovered millennia later by the hapless Sir A. H. Layard and his sloppy successors. Inside the bubble the virtual recording gear is rolling, the minimal life support sighing. All systems are nominal.
Ashurbanipal is very old. He stands supported by his Queen, Ashur-sharrat, and two palace women from the bit-reduti, where he was born from the flanks of his father’s consort. A scribe is reading, from a papyrus scroll, a list of complaints against him, a diatribe of supposed crimes against his own empire. His sons, too jaded, too fresh with the power they will pull from his death, await the end of this reading in the comfort of the palace. Ashurbanipal, as the only Assyrian king capable of reading script, knows well what the scroll holds.
Phillip scratches his nose, bites into an apple. He thinks, have I been a good father?
The scribes conclude reading the scroll. The sons stroll in with their retinue, and the youngest son approaches Ashurbanipal. He has a foot-long, embellished ceremonial knife in his hand. Ashurbanipal slumps into his wife, and raises his head. His eyes seem to lock onto Phillip’s eyes, and he smiles slightly as his youngest son penetrates his abdomen with the knife
Phillip takes another bite of the apple and thinks, while watching Ashurbanipal slump further into his wife and consorts, I need to fix things.
Until they close for good, the dying king’s eyes never waver.
